Maintaining confidentiality of proprietary technology and other business information is an important concern for most modern-day businesses. For those businesses which are primarily engaged in the development of new products and technologies, maintaining confidentiality can be crucial to success or failure. Businesses of all kinds are generally concerned with maintaining confidentiality of relatively mundane information which is developed during the regular course of business such as, for example, customer lists, pricing information, income and cost records, employment records, internal memoranda--the list goes on and on.
The conventional ways of maintaining confidentiality are well known. For example, it is the common practice of many businesses to have employees and prospective business partners execute confidentiality and/or nondisclosure agreements. These kinds of agreements are tailored to meet the needs of the particular situation for which they are intended. They range from simple, one-page documents to extremely lengthy and detailed contracts. Much of the time, they specify how confidentiality of proprietary information is to be maintained and will require that "confidential" or the like be marked on important documents. Along the same lines, many companies also stamp sequential serial numbers on confidential documents.
It is difficult or impossible to prevent the physical act of making unauthorized copies. Most businesses have unsupervised photocopy and fax machines on their premises. These machines constitute an open invitation to anyone intent on making or transmitting an unauthorized copy of a confidential document. Moreover, conventional confidentiality markings are easy to remove from proprietary documents before or after making unauthorized copies. Blueprints, for example, will often bear a single confidentiality notice at a location on the document where there is no other printing. Likewise, serial numbers, when used, are typically printed on page margins where there is no other printing. Markings of this kind can easily be "whited out," thereby producing a "clean" document with no markings.
Some companies have developed anticopying technology designed to prevent the use of photocopy machines for making copies of confidential documents. The common thread to this type of approach is that on-site use of individual photocopy machines is authorized by a password entered into the machine. The machines are provided with a means of scanning or detecting documents for confidentiality markings. They permit normal office copying without password authorization when no confidential markings are detected. When confidential markings are detected, however, they will shut down and/or sound an alarm unless the password is entered.
Machines of the above type have limited effectiveness. After all, most individuals having access to confidential documents also have access to the passwords required for making copies of the documents. Moreover, these machines cannot prevent the copyist from physically removing documents and using a conventional copy machine to make unauthorized copies.
The present invention recognizes that the physical act of making unauthorized copies of confidential documents is virtually impossible to prevent. Consequently, the purpose of the present invention is not to prevent copying. Instead, the invention makes it difficult for the copyist to remove visible confidentiality markings from the document. Making it difficult to remove confidentiality markings has a twofold result: First, it creates a certain reluctance to make copies because the document remains traceable to the source as it is passed from one party to the next. Second, when the document falls into a competitor's hands, it then becomes difficult for the competitor to plead innocence to a claim of misappropriation of trade secret.
What is considered to be the invention with respect to accomplishing the above goal, and how it works, is disclosed below.